A center part of an eyeball, which has a circular shape and looks black or brown in Asian or blue in caucasian, is called an apple of the eye or simply eye, and is also referred to as a region commonly including the iris and pupil. In the present invention, eye means this central part of eyeball which has color according to the color of iris. Eye enlargement means making this center part, eye, look bigger by inserting eye enlargement implant around cornea.
The pupil is an open part at a center of the iris (diaphragm). Light, which has passed through a cornea, passes sequentially through the pupil and through a crystalline lens, and then is refracted to reach a retina. Due to relaxation and contraction actions of muscles in the iris, the pupil shrinks in a light place and is enlarged in a dark place. As a result, light is regulated so as to enter the retina in an appropriate amount. However, if a brain, especially a midbrain is injured because of severe stroke, head injury, or cancer etc, such a regulation ability is deteriorated or disappeared.
For this reason, when a patient is unconscious, neurology/neurosurgery/emergency medicine doctors and nurses always look at the patient's pupils with pen light. With regard to the original pupil, which is composed of the empty space, all people on the earth have the same color, which is black. In contrast, the iris varies depending on races, which is one characteristic point in terms of distinguishing races from each other.
Actual color of the pupil is transparent, but the pupil looks black since the retina hardly reflects light entering the eyeball. However, in a case in which intense light is shot at the pupil directly and instantaneously, the pupil looks red since the red color of the inner wall of the eyeball becomes visible through the pupil (looks red because blood vessels pass through the wall), which is the cause of the red eye effect when a flash is lit up.
The color of the iris is different for each person, especially, for each race, and is largely divided into blue, brown, and dark brown. The iris is the colored part that has a melanin pigment, representing the color of the eye. The color of the eye is determined according to an amount and distribution of the melanin pigment. When the amount of melanin pigment is small, the iris looks blue, when the amount is large, the iris looks brown, when the pigment is deficient, the eye looks red, which is the color of the blood vessel, and when the amount of the melanin pigment is large, the eye looks dark brown.
Since the color around the eye that lies at the center of the eye (black, in a case of Asian) is usually white (the part is usually referred to as ‘white’ or sclera), the distinctive contrast of colors reveals the size of the eye noticeably, and the crisp, big eyes are the target of envy as a measure of women's beauty.
For this reason, recently, circle lenses have been widely worn to make the eye look crisper and bigger.
Circle lenses are one type of color lenses, and mainly have a black color put on edges thereof for beauty, thereby making the eye look bigger when the lenses are worn on. However, the circle lenses have a relatively large thickness due to the pigment, which leads to low oxygen permeability, and the resulting lowered supply of oxygen may be one cause of eye inflammation. The inflammation may cause vision loss or some other side effects, for example, a side effect that the eye looks smaller by blurring a boundary between the white and the dark eye.
As described above, the circle lenses with color put on the edges thereof so as to make the eye look bigger are mainly used for cosmetic purpose, rather than for vision correction. However, if the circle lenses are used indiscriminately without the doctor's prescription, the lenses may cause eye diseases. In addition, cosmetic contact lenses have some disadvantages such as a relatively lower oxygen permeability due to a coloring agent that blocks fine holes in a lens surface, than the ordinary contact lenses for vision correction. Further, the lens has a rough and irregular surface, thus to give a stimulus to the eyes and increase contact area and frequency between the bacteria and the lenses, thereby resulting in a good environment for the bacteria to reproduce. Therefore, when the circle lenses are put on the eyes for beauty for a long time, side effects such as neovascularization, keratitis, corneal ulceration, corneal edema, and the like may occur.
Among them, neovascularization may have an effect of making the eyes look rather smaller. This is because, when wearing the cosmetic circle lenses for a long time, the lowered oxygen permeability may cause hypoxia in the cornea. Thereby, neovascularization may occur on the edge of the cornea and may spread up to the vicinity of the cornea so that the edge of the cornea looks whitish and cloudy, which may make the eye look smaller. Therefore, there is a situation that desperately needs an alternative to the circle lenses, which is capable of accomplishing the cosmetic purpose without harming the health of the eye.